


No Last Names

by TheElusiveOllie



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-03
Updated: 2014-05-03
Packaged: 2018-01-21 19:17:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1561136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheElusiveOllie/pseuds/TheElusiveOllie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No last names. That's what they agreed. Post-#80.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Last Names

_No last names. That’s what we agreed._

Still, it’s strange seeing Jay’s last name in the obituary. It’s so plain and unassuming and normal, in a way that their lives aren’t, weren’t, never would be.

Tim is the one to call the police and the coroners and the funerary services, all anonymously and all with a steady, clipped tone that says nothing about who this strange quiet man was and what he meant to him.  Tim makes the preparations with a careful, practiced indifference.

He doesn’t understand death, he realizes. So he makes no attempt to. This is what he’s good at. He’s good at distance and closing up and walling off.

The funeral is a quiet, rushed affair. Tim slips in halfway through, in the very back, and leaves before it’s over. He recognizes Jay’s parents immediately. The mother is as small and mousy as her son while the father has Jay’s jawline and slightly floppy hair and wide blue eyes. They stare at the empty coffin, and the mother looks as fragile and broken as Jay once did, as Tim feels.

Tim leaves just as they begin to lower the empty casket into the ground. He doesn’t know these people, they don’t know him, and he has no desire to answer awkward questions about who he was and how did he know Jay. He especially does not want to look into the sad, prying eyes of Jay’s parents as they asked him (hypothetically, of course) if he knew what had happened to their boy and where had he been for the last four years and Why Hadn’t He Just Called. Tim doesn’t want it. He’s doing splendidly at not to confronting the situation - it’s what he’s good at - so he maintains careful distance from the whole thing. The steps of his grief are measured and weighed with careful calculation, a precise apathy that keeps him wrapped up in his own thoughts rather than dwelling on the fact that the world was less one man and yet it continued to turn, impassive.

Why would it stop, after all? One man’s life has sputtered and halted and stagnated and ceased, and those are the butterfly wings that threw Tim’s own world into shuddering imbalance, and it makes him needlessly angry that his world should be so impacted whilst the Bigger Picture continues its own way without so much as a shudder.

Tim thinks the father’s blue eyes flicks up to frown at him, puzzled, just as he leaves, but he pays them no mind. Jay’s eyes are were endlessly inquisitive and determined, Tim remembers. The man is _was_ curious. Also selfless, steadfast, loyal, all the typical traits that get a man killed trying to save a selfish bastard of an ex-friend-turned-murderer.

Always asking questions, always looking for out-of-reach answers.

Jay doesn’t _didn’t_ deserve this, to end his search for answers locked in the numb, bleak absurdity of death. It’s impossible to imagine, really how the bright current of his consciousness was simply snatched from him, all that warm and living and vibrant potential quenched and stamped down and extinguished into nothing. Tim can’t imagine it. He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t understand death, and how one can simply be _there_ and then _not_ and then gone, away, unfeeling, _gone gone gone._ Tim can’t picture a void, or the absence of life, or nothing. He just knows Jay would never want it and did not deserve it. 

Jay’s just a meaningless collection of letters and numbers in a police database now, another name to be tentatively paired with an anonymous, nonexistent body, his likeness forever preserved in a tomb of printed ink and thin paper.

Tim wonders if his parents will keep the obituary. Maybe they’ll frame it and hang it in the hallway to commemorate their son’s memory in the lack of any actual recent photos of him.

(Tim had seen the photo in the newspaper, the photo from Before All This, and he hadn’t recognized the man whose cheeks were not hollow, whose eyes were not underlined with dark, sleepless circles, whose face was not gaunt and stricken, whose smile was present and honest and open.)

Maybe Jay’s parents would try to make contact with Tim to ask him for more recent photos. He was the last one to talk to him before. Well.

If such a thing happened, Tim would not answer the phone.

Jay’s parents would have to cling to the obituary to keep the In Loving Memory of their son and it’s all very tragic, but Tim can’t afford to let himself slip out of the emotionless haze he’s drowned himself in now, not when he’s nearly past it. The obituary is fragmented and impersonal and neutral, perfect for the remembrance of their boy.

_(Their boy who kept a YouTube channel which disclosed faceless unknown terrors to the Internet and kept his text as dispassionate and objective as he pretended to be.)_

The parents are free to keep the obituary and hang it on their wall and wonder every day what had happened to their lost Jay and if maybe he was in a Better Place.

Tim shreds it, and leaves this town with its scattered memory behind him.

 


End file.
